Mature Writers Research Articles

ENGAGEMENT IN BRIEFEN: FANNY TARNOWS TEILHABE AN DEN EREIGNISSEN VON 1848/49 ANHAND IHRER KORRESPONDENZ AUS DEN 1830ER UND 1840ER JAHREN

AbstractIn the time preceding, during, and following the revolution in France, Germany, and other European nations in 1848/49, numerous women writers actively participated in the fight for freedom and democracy. However, their involvement manifested in diverse forms. Besides the women categorised as ‘activist’ writers, there were others whose ‘engagement’ was less overt and public. Nevertheless, they too contributed through their writing and ideological alignment with the progressive political movements of their era. This article describes such subversive forms of engagement, using Fanny Tarnow and her correspondence with Karl August Varnhagen von Ense from 1833 to 1849 as a focal point for analysis. Central to this analytical framework is the notion of a dialogical exchange through letters, which served as a cornerstone for both Tarnow and Varnhagen in comprehending their socio‐political roles as mature writers navigating a new era's political landscape and community.

장년 필자의 쓰기 신념이 자전적 텍스트 쓰기 수행에 미치는 영향 연구

This study explores the effects of writing beliefs on a writer’s output. For this purpose, examining older patterns of writing beliefs and techniques was necessary. This helps search for positive improvements in writing beliefs through autobiographical text-writing activities of Internet writing cafes.
 Following are the results of this study. First, the average writing belief starts to decline around the middle age of an entire life cycle. Second, unlike students, variable measures are required to measure the distribution patterns of transmission and transactional writing beliefs of adult writers. Third, on a 5-point scale, the average writing belief was 3.7, which was higher than average, and the writing belief of citizen writers who authored autobiographies was a high 4.04. Fourth, a solidly positive association was found between writing belief and other writing sub-factors. The writing factor test and citizen writer belief test of the adult writer’s writing belief made the anticipation of a positive change in writing belief in adult writer’s autobiographical text writing performance possible.
 The examination of evolving writing beliefs in a person’s life showed that older writers prioritize participating in communication rather than transmitting accurate content. The result necessitates setting up internal and external communication spaces. These spaces can reflect the writing convictions and delivery process of mature writers, prone to being driven into the communication blind spot in social activities or interpersonal relationships after retirement.

Syntactic complexity and connector use in the summary writing of L1 and L2 Canadian students

AbstractThe study compared the syntactic complexity and the use of logical connectors in summaries written in French by two groups of students: speakers of French as first language (L1) and peers in a French-immersion program (L2) from grade nine to university. Both L1 and L2 groups of university students demonstrated more general complexity in their written summaries than less mature writers. However, the use of phrasal elaboration was apparent just at the upper secondary and university levels with L1 students. Both groups generally tend to overuse causal connectors while underusing additive and adversative connectors compared to the author’s use in the source text. Yet both groups employ significantly more adversative connectors just at the post-secondary level. The only difference observed between L1 and L2 writers was in the diversity of connector words used in the summary, with the former group using a richer, more diverse vocabulary. Several measures for succinctness differentiated L1 and L2 students in early secondary with the latter group condensing the source text less than L1 students. Correlation analysis suggested that many measures of syntactic complexity and connector use are inextricably linked.

Eshkol NevoThe Last Interview by Sondra Silverston

Eshkol Nevo The Last Interview Trans. Sondra Silverston. New York. Other Press. 2020. 461 pages. UNCONVENTIONAL ISRAELI writer Eshkol Nevo, the author of several prizewinning novels, has found a new way of reinventing himself with his latest book, The Last Interview. Writer’s-block anxiety or pure stratagem? He chooses to answer questions submitted to him by an unnamed internet interviewer. The narrator himself is not named, and though he insists the novel is not autobiographical, he shares many traits with the author. They both are mature writers, conducting writing workshops, of which the readers can get a glimpse. They both discuss their books with high school students inside the country, and with readers abroad. Both are married with three children, and their grandfather was Levi Eshkol, the third prime minister of Israel , after whom the writer is named. Even though the narrator insists nothing is true in the book, sometimes his experiences seem to really be those of Nevo himself, the relentless “story-hunter” and “story-teller,” who will use any tales overheard on public transportation, or any of his immediate entourage’s experiences, and turn them into well-constructed stories. In the book, the narrator pays dearly for that. His own sixteen-year-old daughter, Shira, shuns him after she inadvertently reads a passage from his book, undeniably taken from her personal journal. She flees to a boarding school in Sde Boker, a faraway spot in the Negev desert. That incident may have triggered what he calls his dysthymia, a low-grade depression that makes him sad and melancholy over almost everything that happens in his life, and certainly these include his beloved wife’s recent colder attitude toward him and his best friend, Ari’s, terminal cancer. Obviously, recurrent questions about his famous grandfather annoy him, and he prefers to talk about his beloved grandmother who welcomed him with tea and compassion when he was lonely and brokenhearted , or his infamous bohemian artist aunt. Among his answers to the hundred-plus questions, two characters emerge as the most important: his wife and Ari. As more and more of the questions become intimate or embarrassing, the answers prompt past regrets, open childhood wounds, confessions he would have loved to “undo,” just like the computer command that he uses freely in his writing. They take the appearance of a flowing novel full of emotional content, far from the silly answers to silly questions at the beginning, like: “What role should the Jews of the Diaspora play in relation to Israel?” “They should come to meetings with Israeli writers. Because no one else does anymore. Except BDS . . . And they leave anyway.” Or: “If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?” “A deejay. It sounds good, and it is not a complete lie.” Indeed, it is not: his frequent use of songs and music to express feelings or situations is one of Nevo’s idiosyncrasies as a writer. Although humor and comic relief pervade some of the stories, the dysthymia amplifies after he unwisely tells his wife, Dikla, he cheated on her while in Colombia to provoke her jealousy; he is immediately thrown out of the apartment. He may try to explain it was only a fib, yet she cannot believe him, the self-declared “professional liar.” Even though he reintegrates into the household to help her with the children, Dikla maintains her distance, and their separation looms in the air. The narrator tries to win her again with dubious success, while his minor attempts at cheating on her fail miserably. The truth is, he is still passionately in love with the mysterious, graceful , ideal companion he found in her. Even after twenty years of marriage, he remains the hopeless romantic who used to woo her with twenty-five-page letters while on a trip to South America. When he is not writing or with his family , he is visiting Ari and standing guard for him. Ari, who protected him when they were traveling to dangerous areas and who taught him at a young age to laugh at himself . Friendship, family, love are once again favorite themes in Nevo’s fifth book. But not just these tropes. Most of...

Helping students with cognitive disabilities improve social writing skills through email modeling and scaffolding

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of email modeling and scaffolding on the social writing quality of students with cognitive disabilities. Ten students from a university-affiliated lab school (mean age = 19.3; SD = 1.2) with an average of IQ of 55.30 (SD = 5.98) and 10 teacher candidates in a university teacher education programme participated in the study. The results suggest that all students with intellectual disabilities were able to holistically improve their social writing quality after exchanging emails with mature writers over a period of 15 weeks. Specifically, the students progressively showed various degrees of improvement in the areas of writing mechanics, lexical and syntactic complexity, writing cohesion, pragmatic propriety and writing motivation. However, the figurative use of language remained unaffected by the email modeling and scaffolding. Taken together, this study suggests that Internet-mediated formats, such as email, can reduce the anxiety of students with intellectual disabilities. Students feel more motivated to engage in writing and do so more actively in social media exchanges, thus improving their virtual social communication skills through writing. Teaching implications of this study are discussed.

Mature Taiwanese Writers’ Development of Writing and Voices between Different Academic Environments

The present study explores four L2 mature writers’ development of writing and voices in English between different academic environments, and seeks to create more meaningful grounds for teaching academic ESL writing in the U.S. and college writing in Taiwan. The approach of this study is influenced by Hirvela and Belcher’s (2001) reading of terms they define as voicist—in other words, terms that refer to voices and identities. Qualitative research methodology is adequate for this exploratory study because of its capacity to gain in-depth and interpretive understanding of the composing process that second language writers employ in different contexts. The study results have highlighted some of the major challenges of academic writing Taiwanese L2 writers encounter when studying abroad at graduate level. One of the salient problems is inadequate academic writing skills, and the sub-problem is a failure to express ideas with a strong individual voice and to position themselves appropriately in their texts (e.g. having a narrow scope of positioning themselves, applying limited linguistic features to position themselves and lacking confidence to express their ideas and to position themselves in texts).As a result, they face great challenges in the Western educational system, but with their development of academic writing skills, voice, critical thinking through academic writing practices, L2 writers can overcome the challenges and become successful writers which can in turn lead to successful academic careers and publishing. Keywords: Second language writing, voice and positioning, academic writing

Israeli Children in a European Theater: Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness and S. Yizhar's Preliminaries

Israeli Children in a European Theater:Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness and S. Yizhar's Preliminaries Sheila E. Jelen How can he know that he is actually sitting here inside a theater, that tiny theater in which the greatest show on earth is being performed, the spectacle of the birth of the new Jew in the new Land?1 In recent years, the premises of Israeli literary history, organized in large part around questions of authors' biographical relationships to the State of Israel (whether the author was born in the Land of Israel or elsewhere, before the establishment of the State or after), have been challenged in discussions over tension in the formation of literary canons between cosmopolitanism and native Israeli authorial identity. For example, Esther Raab, among the first "native" Israeli poets, whose parents were founding pioneers of Petach Tikvah and who was born there in 1894, was valorized for her "nativism." Her landscape poetry, evoking the dry, white-hot reality of the land of Israel was, until recently, read as a sign of her deep connection to the land and was seen as an antidote to the poetry of her European-born peers with its expressions of longing for an unattainable, imagined landscape modeled on European standards of beauty. However, even as Raab was viewed as more "indigenous" to the land, Raab's European-born peers (Avraham Shlonsky, Natan Alterman, and Leah Goldberg), by virtue of their European modernist affiliations, were considered (or considered themselves) superior stylists.2 Critics of late have worked to downplay the value of "nativisim" and to play up the inherent cosmopolitanism in the work of writers who, having [End Page 504] been born in Israel, were nevertheless born to European parents and grew up in European enclaves, both linguistically and culturally. Adriana Tatum, for example, points out that while Raab was born in Petach Tikvah, she was, in fact, surrounded by Russian, French, and German speakers throughout her childhood and even spent several years studying French at the Sorbonne in early adulthood. She lived, in Tatum's view, at a linguistic and cultural crossroads, singing, in Petach Tikvah, Psalms set to the music of the Ukranian national anthem. S. Yizhar, in Preliminaries (2007), and Amos Oz in A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004), negotiate a similar tension, between pride over their role as the first native-born representatives of an autonomous political identity in a Jewish national homeland, and consciousness of cultural forces that exceed a territorial nationalism. Narrated from the perspective of mature writers at the end of their careers, each of these autobiographical novels captures the breadth and the wonder of growing up in an overwhelming psychic world which is the special territory of gifted, sensitive children, but also in the tumultuous period of the new Yishuv on the threshold of the birth of the State of Israel. In A Tale of Love and Darkness and Preliminaries, Oz and Yizhar negotiate the countervailing powers of the self and the nation, depicting their psychological development alongside the political development of the State of Israel whose heavy mantle they were forced, as the children of Zionist idealists (to a greater or lesser degree), to bear. Implicit in each text is a profound awareness of the burdens of growing up as a first-generation Israeli with spiritual and intellectual leanings toward a kind of aesthetic and consciousness that cannot be confined to a single landscape or a single language. Each of these writers, reflecting on his position as a native-born "Eretz-Israeli" Jew to Eastern European immigrants within an imminent Israeli landscape, plays with the expectations heaped upon him—the embodiment of the Zionist ideal—against a backdrop of longing (as in Yizhar's case) or ambivalence (as in Oz's case) for broader, richer, and more culturally resonant European homelands left behind. As Eran Kaplan argues of Oz: "He emerges from [A] Tale of Love and Darkness as a native-born Israeli whose environment and cultural background were shaped as much by Jerusalem of the 1930s and 1940s as by Europe of the previous century."3 Yet, as I hope to argue, while Yizhar seeks to embrace...

“To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious”

“To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious”

Introduction: Developing discourse stance in different text types and languages

Abstract This article introduces the theme of ‘discourse stance’, the unifying focal point for this special issue, and delineates the three dimensions involved in this notion, as described in the position paper [Berman, Ruth A., Ragnarsdottir, Hrafnhildur, Stromqvist, Sven, 2002. Discourse stance.Written Language and Literacy 5, 255–290] that forms the source study to the articles in this volume: orientation, attitude, and generality. It then summarizes predictions proposed there for how discourse stance will be realized in relation to the variables of development (four levels of age and schooling), genre (personal-experience narrative versus expository discussion), modality (written versus spoken texts), and target language (Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Icelandic, Spanish, and Swedish). The article concludes by comparing common themes with language-particular findings that emerge from the analyses presented here. These analyses, conducted on directly comparable data-sets for the different languages, reveal certain shared trends across the sample. A range of lexico-syntactic features of linguistic structure and thematic content interact to express discourse stance; these differ markedly as a function of text type; and more mature speaker–writers express a less monolithic stance than younger schoolchildren. On the other hand, devices for agent downgrading or distancing of the speaker–writer from the contents of the text (such as impersonal use of 2nd person pronouns; generic pronouns like English we, French on, or Dutch men; and middle and passive voice compared with active voice) change in both amount and range both as a function of text type and of age and literacy level, and also cross-linguistically, reflecting different rhetorical options favored by speaker–writers of different languages.

Writing Performance Assessments

Students in Grades 5 and 8 completed a 30-minute writing performance assessment and a writing performance assessment completed over 3 days. Assessments were evaluated on four traits (ideas, organization, conventions, and sentence fluency). A significant interaction was found at Grade 5 between length of time allotted for the assessment and students' educational classification (general or special education). Grade 5 students performed significantly better on the 3-day writing assessment, with students in special education benefiting the most. At Grade 8, there were no differences between scores on the 30-minute and the 3-day assessments. No significant differences were found in students' writing performance across various types of discourse (narrative, imaginative, persuasive, and expository); significant differences were reported across certain writing traits. We shared three hypotheses for reported differences: (a) students' proficiency with the writing process, (b) scoring scale bias, and (c) differences in the revision behaviors of developing and mature writers. Educational implications related to statewide test programs are discussed.

A ‘computer tutor’ to assist children develop their narrative writing skills: conferencing with HARRY

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that a computer tool can change the way children approach the task of writing and improve their writing performance. HARRY, a web-based computer tutor, provides a Vygotskian-like scaffolding of the knowledge transforming mature writing process and presents it to children individually in a conference situation. The effects of the computer tutor are analysed by comparing stories produced by three children of varied writing ability, who wrote a control and a HARRY-assisted story, and by observing the children as they wrote. A control group also wrote two stories without receiving assistance for either story. The study's hypothesis was confirmed. With HARRY's assistance, the children wrote better stories and employed the revision process characteristic of mature writers. Vygotsky's work suggests that children will learn to adopt the mature approach from repeated use of the system and that the scaffolding should be reduced gradually. However, as the system relied upon the children's willingness to first request, then act upon the available guidance, the system would benefit from further development to ensure children interact sufficiently with HARRY.

Coming back to voice: The multiple voices and identities of mature multilingual writers

Compositionists often speak of the need to help students acquire a voice or identity in their writing. This interest in teaching voice is understandable but also problematic. Satisfactorily defining “voice,” especially from a second language (L2) point of view, is one of those problems. Another is a reliance on various conceptualizations that privilege a “Western” or a romantic or individualistic notion of voice in classroom situations where many students do not share such a background. In this paper, we use three case studies to address a third problem: a tendency in L2 writing instruction and research to overlook the voices, or identities, already possessed by L2 writers, many of whom at the graduate level bring a history of success as professional/academic writers in their native language and culture to the L2 writing classroom. We examine the role voice can play not as a teaching device but rather as a means by which to investigate and understand the voice-related issues these mature writers encounter in L2 contexts.

Cognitive Technologies for Writing

Current technologies are useful for improving the productivity and appearance of writing. However, with several notable exceptions, they neither offer qualitative advances over previous tools in helping mature writers express or refine their thoughts, nor help novices develop better writing skills. We propose that writing tools contribute indirectly to writing development (e.g., by encouraging more writing) when they should provide direct support, in ways to be described. At the same time, an exciting new cognitive-developmental perspective on

Study of the Form and Extent of Natural Variation in Genuine Writings with Age

The degree of variation in mature writers and its effect on handwriting after a period of 10 years has been studied. This paper is based on an examination of fifty persons aged from 30 to 55 years. It was concluded that the range of natural variation, rather than the characteristics themselves, will change gradually with time. This change justifies the necessity for contemporary writings in comparison of handwriting, even though handwriting characteristics remain more or less permanent.

Style: Ten lessons in clarity and grace

In his preface, Joseph M. Williams says that Style: ten lessons in clarity and grace focuses on “the single most serious problem that mature writers face: a wordy, tangled, too-complex prose style.” His book deals with that problem admirably. Indeed, the advice and examples furnished by Williams are varied and sophisticated enough to make it a useful resource for any mature writer — even the mature writer whose prose is clear and concise.